I’m not talking about ‘snowdrops on kittens and whiskers on roses’ or whatever they sing about in the Sound of Music, but a wonderful example of a memory technique demonstrated on one of the UK’s soap operas.

Some while ago, Vera Duckworth, a long lasting character in the UK’s oldest TV soap, Coronation Street, died. For non-UK readers, the Street is quite an institution in the UK, broadcast since 1960, and this character had been on the show for decades.

After the character’s death, her screen husband said to another character something like ‘snowdrops were her favourite flower. Every time you look at a snowdrop, think of Vera.’

Now just across the road from our house is a bank with about 5 million snowdrops on it, and it really does work. Every time I see them, it reminds me of this little soap moment and the character.

We get so used to computers we tend to think of human memory in the same, linearly structured way as the digital variety, but of course it isn’t. It is so much easier to lock in a human memory if it’s associated with images, however tenuously, as this example demonstrates (anyone who has seen the show would realize that Vera Duckworth and a delicate little snowdrop don’t provide a natural association). Nice one, whoever wrote the episode, though part of me hopes that by next snowdrop time this link will have faded away.

Quick aside – there’s an interesting disparity between the audience of the soap, which I’d guess is biassed towards the middle aged, and the makers’ aspirations as demonstrated by the website, which seems to be aimed at 18 to 25s. Don’t they know all 18 to 25s spend every evening binge drinking, and so are never there to watch soap operas? Get with it, ITV.